Let’s be honest here. Pawn has been just a little spooked by this whole pandemic situation, and many of the largest art galleries have gone neglected this trip, due to concerns about overcrowding, exposure, etc. Friday morning marked the occasion of the necessary Fit To Fly COVID-19 test (passed, BTW) and, following that, I screwed up the courage to make a few visits to these galleries.

First was the Koestler Arts exhibition, The I and the We, at Royal Festival Hall. This annual show (different name and guest curators each instance) brings together artworks from people who are incarcerated, under state care, or otherwise not able to pursue their life on their own terms as free people. I’ve made a point to attend this show whenever possible, especially after seeing a beautiful image at the first one I attended, 2018’s edition I’m Still Here:

Last years event was entirely online, and this year’s is displayed there, as well as in-person viewing at the RFH. I was the first person to enter the exhibition during public-view hours (tho the number of sold works tells me there was an earlier private event…). There are 81 pieces from this exhibition available for purchase from Koestler’s shop.

Here are some of my favourites:

The anonymous entry, Who Is The Imposter, was a cheeky collection in miniature of some of art’s most famous pieces. Here are closeups of a couple:

Next up was a short walk from RFH to the Southbank’s main arts venue, Hayward Gallery. They have two shows up right now, Mixing It Up: Painting Today, featuring 31 currently practicing British artists, and Gerhard Richter: Drawings.

Mixing it Up was a real treat, and I almost skipped it. The featured artists are in various phases of their careers, and fame. Again, here are just a few favourites:

The Gerhard RIchter, Drawings exhibition was small, and quite simple. Just a row of framed paper drawings, sketches, watercolours, etc. ringed two small gallery spaces. Most of these didn’t really look like much beyond impressions, at least to me. Here’s a watercolour which struck me.:

Richter in the rearview mirror, Pawn decamped Southbank for the tony climes of Barbican, to explore the major Noguchi retrospective on view there. But first encountered the lovely and moving Shilpa Gupta exhibition, Sun at Night, in The Curve gallery there.

The first thing one sees in this exhibit is a pair of train-terminal arrival/departure boards with those old style flippy letters. With a loud clickety clack the messages on these two sings cycle through various phrases and emotions.

As one descends the Curve’s length, the walls periodically hold small frames with delicate pen & paper drawings, accompanied by a poem or other thought.

At the bottom end of the whole space, a partitioned off room encloses the final piece of art, an installation involving 100 speakers, 100 microphones, stands, and pages of text, all in a space so dark that one can read nothing, perceive little, and only after adjusting to the darkness, can one start to absorb the weight of the spoken words coming from all about the room, from the many speakers. Here are a couple of images from the gallery:

The main gallery at Barbican is given over to the afore mentioned Isamu Noguchi retrospective. This is a huge exhibit, taking both floors of the gallery space, to great effect. One starts in the upper galleries, which, as a series of alcoves off of the mezzanine walkway surrounding the lower gallery space, are well suited for this exhibition, providing a series of isolated cells into which small collections of Noguchi’s objects, designs, thoughts and relics are placed. In each alcove at least one quote from him is featured.

Here’s a couple of snaps:

As I wrote to E, of Degree, on whose recommendation I had come to Barbican:

It was hard to escape the twentieth century without becoming familiar with Noguchi’s designs. Some of them becoming so ubiquitous that it was easy to forget that he, that anyone, had “designed” them. But to see so many together, with context, text-text, and the supporting documentation was great.

In my years doing stage lighting I worked with many dancers, especially “Modern Dance” practitioners, who owed their art’s lineage to Martha Graham. I hadn’t known, however, how closely she had collaborated with Noguchi, and to what splendid effect! So, lesson learnt there. A splendid exhibition and testament to a brilliant designer and artist.

Tate Modern has an expansive exhibition, The Making of Rodin, currently open. Above is a panorama of just some of the vast library of small body parts he made in preparation for an uncompleted suite of sculptures, but which he kept in files for possible use.

The very first thing we see, alone in the entry gallery, is The Age of Bronze, a life sized nude. But this is the only bronze in the show. This exhibition focuses not on the finished marble or cast bronze sculptures with which we’re mostly familiar, but with the plaster and clay from which those finished products emerged.

It’s hard to deny the power of Rodin’s works, from The Thinker to his busts and full body works on Balzac. Here one gets to see the studies and preparatory models which led to those, and many other, great works. Here, with The Thinker one is able to get so close to the piece, and see details in the plaster which most likely would vanish in the darkness of bronze:

Just look at the musculature on the near arm. Here we see the head for Balzac, still rough:

And here is Balzac’s bath robe (seriously), the finished model is in the background, seen from the rear:

And finally, a study of Camille Claudel, Rodin’s assistant, an artist in her own right. An entire gallery text is given over to discussion of the treatment of women — artists and models both — within the strictures of the times.

I very much enjoyed this exhibit. And Tate is to be commended on their gallery COVID protocols, which by and large worked out. The crowds were never too big, the arrows on the floor tended to keep people moving along in controlled paths, and masking was mostly observed.

For the first time in two years, following the now typical pandemic interruption, Affordable Art Fair is back in Battersea Park. With a VIP invitation from the good folk at Degree Art, Pawn has returned to these climbs to check out the latest on offer.

What is on is much the same as what was on the last time I made this journey to Battersea, back in 2018. There is a lot of metal — as a surface, applique, accent — and lots of bright colours. Lots of cheeky self-referential humour, lots of glamorous characters, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, joined by Amy Winehouse, for example, or the near ubiquitous David Bowie.

Pawn’s favourite Sophie Derrick is well represented in Degree’s own booth, including the large, truly impressive, and already sold, Freed Feint, made in cut-out:

Pawn is proud to have several of Sophie’s pieces in his collection, but frankly cannot afford her any longer. 🙁

Outside of Degree’s offerings, very little truly inspires on this visit, but there is this one piece, found in a far precinct of the fair, The Lemonade Stand, by “Mr Everybody”

AFF have thoughtfully provided a shuttle bus for the fair, running from Sloane Square to the fair tent. I take this back to Sloane, and stalk up from there to Hyde Park and the Serpentine Galleries. The North Gallery hosts James Barnor: Accra/London, a retrospective. Barnor is a Ghana-born photographer whose six decade career included long stints in London, as well as his native Accra. Both are treated in this expansive show.

COVID protocols are in force throughout the Serpentine’s galleries, and here good use is made of the natural circular traffic flows of the space. Fashion as well as editorial pieces fill the space. Here’s a couple of faves:

A decidedly more outre exhibit awaits at the South Gallery, in Hervé Télémaque: A Hopscotch Of The Mind. Télémaque works in whatever media suits him, or so it seems. Sculpture, assemblage, painting, you name it. Some of it is quite in-your-face, and never restrained. Here’s a couple of snaps:

You must see the Paula Rego at Tate Britain, I heard again and again. Okay, okay; I’ll go.

One problem, they’re fully booked through Sunday, when it closes.

With membership card in hand, off I go anyway down to Pimlico. Sure enough, upon entering I see this:

I told the nice guy at the membership counter that I had come all the way from America just to see it. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Okay, he let me in. Membership has its privileges!

The very first piece in the show just grabs me. I have seen my share of Paula Rego before this (more on that later) but I have certainly never seen this piece. Forgot to get the name of it, but here’s the image:

This is an expansive late-career retrospective, featuring more than 100 works spanning 60 years and 11 galleries. It’s the largest ever shown in the UK. I shan’t do it justice here with amateur snaps and critique. I liked the show, even as I bristled at some of the imagery, and simply didn’t get others. The piece above remains my favourite of the lot, but I have a soft spot for the Pillow Man triptych (centre panal here):

The full triptych was featured a few years ago in a show I saw on the influences — of and by — Francis Bacon. A pleasure to see it here, again.

William Blake is a point of pride for the English, and they’re quick to remind you he was an artist as well as poet. I contend he was a man before his time, a comic book maker before comic books existed. The current exhibition of his drawings, prints, books and such at Tate Britain makes my point for me. Pawn attended Sunday along with artist friend J.

Blake was born in London in 1757, in Broad St, Soho, and stayed in that area throughout his life, passing away in 1827. While most American college students know Blake for his poetry, here his work as a print maker is at least as well known, and celebrated. Print making is how he made his living, for the most part, having been trained as an engraver. In 1788 he developed a new technique, Relief Etching, which allowed him to combine text and graphics (sound familiar?) on a single page.

Most of Blakes prints center around biblical themes and stories, and, as such, are somewhat a mystery to me, with my not-so-religious tendencies. I can still enjoy the imagery, of course. Religious stories dovetail with the overwrought nature of Blake’s work. Musculature is always on display, to the point of absurdity at times. Take this example, where even the clutching child is ripped:

The exhibit is expansive, containing tonnes of Blake’s work, including several complete volumes, many of which had previously been rent from their bindings, the better to be displayed as individual pieces. There’s even some discussion of this practice, and rumination upon how the viewing experience is changed when these images are encountered separately, as opposed to turning page after page of them.

One later piece, in the final gallery, is displayed with each page laid out, and a magnifier lens available to place over to aid in the reading. One visitor took this not as a suggestion, but a commandment, and proceeded to go from page to page with the magnifier, reading aloud the text for all to hear. Quite odd, that.

Enough of my prattling, for that matter. Here’s more snaps, cleaned up a bit. Then I’ll leave you to it.

As with almost all of the large museum shows this trip, William Blake was heavily attended, the crowds making it quite hard to enjoy the works in many cases. The show, at Tate Britain, runs through 2 February 2020.

Okay, I’m back. Also at Royal Academy, alongside Lucian Freud, is Antony Gormly, a farily impressive mid-career retrospective, including some truly humongous works, six of which were commissioned or produced for this show, making full use (and more!) of the large gallery spaces of the RA.

The smallest work, 1999’s Iron Baby, isn’t even “in” the show, as it’s a rather subtle lump of metal on the floor of the RA’s courtyard; a baby, indeed, upon closer inspection.

The first room of the exhibit, attended by a crowd exceeding even that in the Freud show, is filled with early works, from the 1970s – 80s. I honestly had a hard time getting to where I could appreciate many of these, for as soon as one could establish enough distance from a piece to properly look at it, someone would step in to fill the void and thus obscure the work. As a result, I adopted the technique of simply trying to see what I could, and take quick snapshots of what I couldn’t properly appreciate, for later viewing. Here’s some of those, in no particular order.

Now we are into the modern works, and these are huge, and huge crowd pleasers. Just getting around Clearing VII took effort. Not just from clamoring over and around the unspooled tubing, but working through the crowds of onlookers.

The next gallery contained Matrix III, 2019, a massive piece of lightweight construction. Twenty-one room sized cages made of construction steel mesh (“98% recycled” the pamphlet assures us) all intersect in the space above our heads in the large, central gallery. The effect is amazing, and finally calms the crowds somewhat. Some simply lay down on the floor beneath it, staring up, dazed.

One of the most successful, and bewitching, pieces is Lost Horizon, 2019, in which countless of Gormly’s trademark male figures stand in a room, on all surfaces of a room, peering aimlessly out into space.

Two galleries further along, past cases of sketchbooks and drawings (almost impossible to get to and look at) is a confounding pile of metal, piled up just past the entrance to the next gallery. A part of this assemblage opens like a hungry maw into this gallery, providing a path for those adventurous souls. This is Cave, 2019.

The next room, into which one spills if passing thru Cave, (Pawn, by the way, chose not to), is a smaller gallery with a door partially open to view Host, 2019, a large gallery, the floor lined with clay from the seaside, and filled with ocean water. The crowd simply piles up around this doorway, gawking and fumbling with phones.

So what? I love Gormly’s work, in small doses. His human forms are so simple, resonant, and moving in their mute vulnerability. In this exhibit, with the large and imposing works, one sees more than those simple figures. It is wildly successful, as the crowds and their reactions reveal. Matrix III is an amazing accomplishment in realization, and is both jarring and contemplative at once. Host, less so, for me at least; same with Cave. Although the jumble of metal behind Cave is a joy, in its irreverence to the hallowed halls of RA. All in all, I enjoyed this exhibit, but, once again, for the crowds.

Antony Gormly, through 3 December 2019 at the Royal Academy, Picadilly.